Andy Matuschak

Revamping the mnemonic medium around reader control

When you read non-fiction, you’re in the driver’s seat. You can skip to the last page and read only the conclusion. You can riffle through the pages, reading only the headings; or you can spend a week reading ten pages with extreme care. You don’t need to focus on just one text: you can compare one book’s ideas to another sitting by its side. Great non-fiction authors exert careful control over their prose, but once a book arrives in your hands, it becomes a tool in your service. You’ll use each book according to your own needs and...

Armories for tool-maker / tool-user collaborations

I’ve previously argued that great tools for thought rarely come from contexts focused on creating tools. They’re usually created in the course of deep creative work in some domain, almost as a byproduct. And they’re usually made by people with significant expertise and investment in those creative problems. Stephen Wolfram created Mathematica to accelerate his original research on cellular automata; Alan Kay created Smalltalk to support PARC’s personal computing experiments; Dan Bricklin created VisiCalc in business school to help so...

Finding research–context fit

The life of an early startup revolves around a desperate search for “product–market fit”—a state in which you’ve found a solution so compelling in some market that the world starts yanking the product out of you faster than you can make it. That’s when the exponential flywheels can start spinning and a startup can start to make good on its rocket-fueled ambitions.

Aspiring inventors of “tools for thought” aren’t chasing rapid cu...

Crowdfunded research vs. the NSF CAREER grant; open-sourcing Orbit; new technical collaborators

Transcript:

Hello everyone, and happy May. I think celebrating is always more fun in video format, so I'm making this impromptu video today to celebrate a couple of exciting pieces of news with you all.

The first is that the Patreon community that you all are a part of, or perhaps you're visiting today, has hit an important milestone. I wanted to share that and some thoughts about what it might mean for crowdfunding research in general.

The second is that I'm 2021-05-05 05:45:36 +0000 UTC View Post

[Audio version] Crowdfunded research vs. the NSF CAREER grant; open-sourcing Orbit; new technical collaborators

I'm terribly sorry for all the duplicate emails: Descript garbled my exports. Still learning about these "content creator" tools… anyway, here's a fixed version!

And a transcript:

Hello everyone, and happy May. I think celebrating is always more fun in video format, so I'm making this impromptu video today to celebrate a couple of exciting pieces of news with you all.

The first is that the Patreon community that you all are a part of, or perhaps you're visiting today, has hit an important milestone. I wanted to share that...

[Audio version] Too easy to be effortless

As an experiment, I've made an audio version of the most recent post, Too easy to be effortless. Is this useful? Would you value consuming the material I write here as a feed in your podcasting app? Email/comment if so!

It does consume some extra time, so it's probably not something I'll do unless it's something you all would find valuable.

(Thanks to Bryan Clark for sug...

Too easy to be effortless

Now that a few Orbit experiments are in flight, I’ve spent much of the last month digging back into data from Quantum Country. I’m struck by a surprising problem: basically everyone remembers basically everything, basically all the time.

Feelings-driven optimization

How effortless can memory be?

At the limit, we can imagine automatically remembering everything we perceive. We might not want that—savants like 2021-03-26 22:08:46 +0000 UTC View Post

Ratcheting progress in tools for thought

There are some people trying to develop tools for thought, but there isn’t yet a meaningful field around tools for thought. The difference is that a field is about ratcheting: developing a growing shared corpus of general knowledge and methods which allow projects to meaningfully build on each other, across researchers and across years, on and on in an upward cycle. Individuals here and there have contributed powerful insights, certainly, but true success for this field would mean a new practice of human tool-making, and the creat...

In search of better questions

One provocative litany I’ve used to frame my work is: what comes after the book? Is it pictures of pages on screens? Is it videos of lectures? Why are all the answers to this question so boring? Where are the powerful ideas about how people learn, feel, and act?

I’ve been exploring memory systems as one avenue in response. But in my mind, doing something interesting with memory systems means leaving behind spaced repetition systems as we understand them today. The goal isn’t to “scale Anki.” It’s to use prototype s...

Member preview: try Orbit in your own writing

Hello, all! I'm having a contemplative start to the year, working to shift up some of my systems and plans in response to the reflections in my 2020 wrap-up essay. I hope your 2021 is already offering you many interesting rabbit holes.

Now that Orbit is being used so prominently in How to write good prompts, I'm receiving a lot of requests from people ...

Reflections on 2020 as an independent researcher

Now available publicly if you'd like to link to it externally.

2020 was my second year as an “independent researcher.” It’s certainly not a well-defined job title. I’m grateful for the freedom it entails, but I’ve needed to grope around in the dark for patterns and structures which pre-existing institutions and roles would ordinarily provide. To begin 2021, I’ll share some of what I’ve learned and some of the outstanding ques...

Your help requested! Quick survey on funding independent research

As the year draws to a close, I'm assembling some reflections on being an independent researcher in 2020. One important section centers on patronage as a funding model—and I could use your help to complete it!

Willing to help? Please click here to send me a quick sentence or two about why you're a patron. The form is anonymous.

Your response will help me validat...

Prompt makeover logs

My past few weeks have been filled with plenty of interesting conversation about the prompt-writing guide and the challenges of formulating knowledge, both in the workshops and in email correspondence. 

Amusingly, one of the richest discussions I've been able to observe has been José (aka Artir)'s conversation with himself as he criticizes his own recent ...

Early access: "Translating knowledge into spaced repetition prompts"

I spent November working on a detailed guidebook and style manual for modeling knowledge and writing spaced repetition prompts. The guide will also be the first large public demonstration of Orbit: the text is interleaved with prompts mean to help readers internalize its content.

I'd like to give you early access: click here to read. (please don't share this with others yet)

This guide 2020-12-07 18:04:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Invitation: "Translating knowledge," workshop on spaced repetition prompt-writing

I've been shifting my focus to helping authors learn to write with Orbit. As part of that effort, I'm developing a set of materials to help people develop a personal spaced repetition practice, since I believe that may be a practical prerequisite to using prompts in communication.

If you're interested in learning to internalize complex knowledge using spaced repetition, I'll be running some live workshops on that topic. As members of my lab community, you're...

Liquid olives and iPhones; problem-solving and problem-finding; The Uncertainty Mindset

Growing up years ago in the midwest, my perception of a fancy restaurant was awfully simple. Firstly, fancy restaurants have fancy waiters who make you feel uncomfortable for using the wrong utensil. And secondly, fancy restaurants use fancier ingredients: the menu might include ribeye and lobster instead of hamburgers and barbecue. But then I moved to California, and—to make a long story short—a bowl of tapioca made me weep. I learned that great restaurants are rarefied institutions of extraordinary innovation and artistry.

Around...

Working with authors: text-writing requires prompt-writing requires text-writing

A few weeks ago, I had something to celebrate: Orbit had reached the point that authors could publish texts using it. Normally, when software projects reach a major milestone, there’s something highly visible that “goes live”—something to link others to! But in this instance, it’s a piece of infrastructure that’s “gone live”; now the work is in helping others use it to create something meaningful.

As I’ve worked with authors, I’ve realized something important I should have seen much earlier: authors who don’t alre...

Preview: a brief explanation of Orbit

I've been tackling a tough writing challenge: briefly introducing Orbit, explaining how it works, and sketching what it aspires to.

The context is that at least initially, people will first encounter Orbit as a small embedded widget in a web site. There's not much room for explanation there, so the widget has a "learn more" button for people interested in more details. At least initially, I'll treat that page as a general-purpose explainer, linkable in other contexts.

So here's my attempt at distilling Orbit into a few hundred wo...

The carrying capacity of a regular memory practice; deliberate practice and flow

Slow, compounding progress is a subtly powerful force. Regular weightlifters might not perceive their progress in every session, but as the weeks go by, they’ll find they can handle loads which would previously have flattened them. Richard Hamming makes a similar observation for intellectual efforts in The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:

I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked him, “How can anyone my age know as much as John...

2020-09-30 18:07:45 +0000 UTC View Post

The galaxy brain problem; speed-running UIs

I’ve been spending a lot of time these last few weeks trying to make Orbit explain itself.

In Quantum Country, the essays themselves are, in part, essays about the mnemonic medium. The first essay spends 1,000+ words introducing, motivating, and elaborating the system; later essays spend hundreds of words. But we don’t want every author who uses Orbit in a book or article to have to write a lengthy introduction to the medium. The system needs to introduce itself—at least in part.

This is quite a challenge! If we make people...

“Skip”: exponential-backoff deferral mechanisms and fuzzy inboxes

If you search Google Scholar for research on spaced repetition systems, you’ll find a sea of papers focused on optimization. They’re tuning algorithms for less forgetting, more stabilization, better scheduling. To be clear, these are worthy aspirations. If we can improve response accuracy even just a couple percentage points, the exponential schedule magnifies our gain, substantially increasing the capacity of our system. But this extreme focus on efficiency misses the highest-order bit: almost no one actually uses these systems, so thei...

Celebrating a significant Patreon milestone; thoughts on crowdfunding tools for thought

We've now crowdfunded two thirds of a grad student-level grant for research on tools for thought.

Early access to new essay: "Timeful Texts"

Click here to read "Timeful Texts."

How might one create a medium which does the job of a book, but which escapes a book’s shackled sense of time? How might one create timeful texts—texts with affordances extending the authored experience over weeks and months, texts which continue the conversation with the reader as they slowly integrate tho...

2020-07-24 16:39:45 +0000 UTC View Post

A nascent art direction for Orbit

(You may have received a duplicate notification for this post: Patreon lost all the images in the last one, so I had to recreate it! Bluh…)

So far, I’ve been using Quantum Country’s design language for Orbit, just to help me focus on all the architectural work I’ve had to do. That was a useful constraint for a while, but Orbit’s almost ready for its first publications, so now it’s time to switch gears: how might Orbit’s visuals reinforce its ideas?

Orbit has two enormous visual design challenges.

First: Orbit ...

Demonstrating a "personal mnemonic medium"

I've spent lots of time this past year thinking about how to use writing to develop ideas over time. Writing is an important part of my research process; those couple hours each morning are often "where the real thinking happens."

Of course, I also use spaced repetition systems to engage more deeply with ideas. But at least until late last year, the two systems were unpleasantly divorced. 2020-06-10 18:15:35 +0000 UTC View Post

Bringing ideas into your Orbit

As I’ve mentioned in recent posts here, I’ve spent these last few months building infrastructure which I hope will help me (and others!) explore a wider set of ideas around systems like the mnemonic medium. In some real sense, it feels like I’m building my research lab!

One strange thing about building a system like this is that I have only a hazy picture of what I’m actually building. I build the thing to see, so that I can build the thing, and so on. My conception of the core structure is constantly evolving, and what follows...

Big milestone today: generic embeddable prompts

Hello, kind patrons! I mentioned in the last post that I was working on a next iteration of the system behind Quantum Country that can be embedded anywhere on the web: blog posts, e-books, Twitter threads, academic papers, etc. Today I hit a milestone I've been working toward for a couple months!

In the video, I've doctored collaborator Michael Nielsen's great notes on direct...

What's next?

Hello, kind supporters! Andy here. Now that the final chapter of Quantum Country’s published, we wanted to share what we’re up to next.

First off: an important update to the Patreon. After years of scrappy independent projects, Michael’s decided it’s (perhaps past) time to pursue stable employment. We’ll still be talking about these projects all the time, but they’ll be a side-project for him, rather than a full-time gig. So starting next month, this becomes a solo Patreon. I’ll still be pursuing the same ideas—just wit...